64-Year-Old Kayaker Completes Trans-Atlantic Voyage

These days, thanks to technological advancements in air and sea travel, crossing the Atlantic is usually no big deal. But crossing the Atlantic by yourself in a kayak? Now that’s still something worth celebrating.

Aleksander Doba, a 64-year-old native of Poland, took off from Dakar, capital of the west African nation of Senegal, back on Oct. 26. After 98 days, 23 hours, 42 minutes at sea, Doba and his custom 23-foot-long, 39-inch-wide human-powered kayak landed at Acaraú, a city on Brazil’s northeast coast. The trip covered some 3,320 miles in all, and Doba became only the fourth known person to accomplish such a feat, and the very first to do it nonstop.

Of course, Doba encountered his fair share of obstacles along the way — age, a broken desalination unit, 20-foot swells and stifling equatorial heat — but none of that would deter him, as he survived on dehydrated food products, candy and fish (which he caught along the way). He also made time to collect rainwater for drinking, communicate by sat phone (recharged by solar panels lining his vessel), and even send out a few tweets.

Doba paddled this route across the Atlantic, based on plots from his on-board GPS tracking system.

Incredibly, Doba (a former champion white-water kayaker) averaged only some 34 miles a day, and his average speed for the entire trip was only 1.4 miles per hour. That requires a lot of patience for someone with no access to help or medical aid if something happened to him. But Doba had no major health problems when he arrived in Brazil last week, having seemingly drifted in from nowhere.